August

by Romina Paula, Jennifer Croft (Translator)

Traveling home to rural Patagonia, a young woman grapples with herself as she makes the journey to scatter the ashes of her friend Andrea. Twenty-one-year-old Emilia might still be living, but she’s jaded by her studies and discontent with her boyfriend, and apathetic toward the idea of moving on. Despite the admiration she receives for having relocated to Buenos Aires, in reality, cosmopolitanism and a career seem like empty scams. Instead, she finds her life pathetic.

Once home, Emilia stays with Andrea’s parents, wearing the dead girl’s clothes, sleeping in her bed, and befriending her cat. Her life put on hold, she loses herself to days wondering how if what had happened—leaving an ex, leaving Patagonia, Andrea leaving her—hadn’t happened.

Both a reverse coming-of-age story and a tangled homecoming tale, this frank confession to a deceased confidante. A keen portrait of a young generation stagnating in an increasingly globalized Argentina, August considers the banality of life against the sudden changes that accompany death.

Romina Paula is one of the most interesting figures under forty currently active on the Argentine literary scene: a playwright, novelist, director, and actor. This is her first book to be translated into English.

Jennifer Croft is a writer, translator, and critic. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize.

Genres: Fiction, Womens, Latin American, Literature, Contemporary, 21st Century, Novels

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 18, 2009

About the author

Romina Paula nació en Buenos Aires en 1979. Es egresada de la Carrera de Dramaturgia de la EMAD. Como actriz se formó con Alejandro Catalán, Ricardo Bartís y Pompeyo Audivert y participó en las obras El Padre, con dirección de Pablo Ruiz, Darío tiene momentos de soledad, de Santiago Gobernori, La niña fría, con dirección de Daniel Veronese, La Pornografía y Los Demonios, de Gonzalo Martínez, El diván, de Michel Dydim y La Marea, de Mariano Pensotti. En cine trabajó en La punta del diablo de Marcelo Paván, Resfriada de Gonzalo Castro, en las películas El hombre robado,Todos mienten y Viola de Matías Piñeiro, en El Estudiante, de Santiago Mitre y en El día trajo la oscuridad. Recibió el Premio Sur a Revelación Femenina 2011 por su rol en El estudiante.

Realizó talleres de narrativa y clínica de obra con Juan Martini y Anna Kazumi Stahl. Como dramaturga y directora estrenó las obras Si te sigo, muero sobre textos de Héctor Viel Temperley y Algo de ruido hace, seleccionada para el VI Festival Internacional de Teatro de Buenos Aires. Su obra [chalet] obtuvo una mención en el Premio Germán Rozenmacher a la Nueva Dramaturgia 2007. En septiembre del 2007 dirigió la obra Ciego de Noche, de Darja Stocker, en el Ciclo de Nueva Dramaturgia organizado por el Instituto Goethe. En ese mismo año recibe el Premio Estímulo ‘S’ para la realización de su nueva obra.

En abril 2008 estrenó la obra Todos los miedos de Mariana Chaud en el C.C.R.Rojas en el marco del ciclo Decálogo – Indagación sobre los 10 Mandamientos.

En mayo de 2008 viaja a Berlin becada por el Instituto Goethe para participar de un Workshop dictado por Renee Pollesch en el marco del festival alemán Berliner Festspiele.

En 2008 la obra Algo de ruido hace, formó parte de la gira Itinerarte, realizando funciones en España en las ciudades de San Sebastián, Santander y Segovia. Fue invitada al Festival Porto Alegre em Scena y al Festival el Quinto Argentino de Teatro de la ciudad de Santa Fe. Esta obra también fue seleccionada para formar parte del programa Formación de Espectadores 2008, organizado por Ana Durán.

Publicó la novela ¿Vos me querés a mí?, el relato Autonomía en la antología Buenos Aires/ Escala 1:1,y la obra Algo de ruido hace en la antología Dramaturgias, en Editorial Entropía. Publicó el relato Si llegás a faltar un verano en la antología Mujeres Infieles en la Editorial Emecé y el relato Siesta en la antología alemana Asado Verbal de la editorial Wagenbach. Su segunda novela, Agosto, fue finalista del Premio Página/12 a la Nueva Novela y se publicó en septiembre de 2009, en Editorial Entropía. Su obra Fiktionland esta editada en el sello Fischerverlag en idioma alemán.

En febrero 2010 estrenó El tiempo todo entero, obra que escribió y dirige, sobre El Zoo de Cristal de Tennessee Williams, junto a la Compañía El Silencio. Este espectáculo se presentó en la ciudad de Girona, hizo temporada en el Theatre du Rond Point de Paris durante el mes de diciembre de 2011, formó parte del Festival Santiago a Mil en la ciudad de Santiago de Chile en enero de 2012 y del Festival de Nápoles en junio del mismo año. En enero de 2013 El tiempo todo entero giró por las ciudades de Aix en Provence, Arles, Pau, Girona, Tolouse, Montbeliard, Córcega, Montepellier y Girona.

Romina Paula recibió el Premio Florencio Sánchez a mejor obra argentina del 2010 por este texto.

En 2011 estrenó la obra Fiktionland que escribió junto al autor suizo Gerhard Meister en el Espacio Callejón, e hizo funciones en el festival suizo Auawirleben en la ciudad de Berna. En mayo de este año participó de la residencia para artistas del festival internacional Kunsten Festival de Arts en la ciudad de Bruselas.

En mayo del 2013 la Compañìa el Silencio estrenó su nuevo espectáculo, Fauna, en el Centro Cultural San Martin, haciendo una temporada de cinco semanas, reponiéndose luego en el Espacio Callejón.

En 2013 se editaron las obras Fauna, El tiempo todo entero y Algo de ruido hace por E

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about grief, but the narrator is so honest and intimate that it's like reading a diary or letters to her lost friend, that casual sort of writing you only do with someone you already share a history with, that you don't have to explain yourself to. A lot of second person that I read as addressed to her friend and not to me as the reader. Plus 90s cultural references.

I ordered this on an impulse a few months ago but saved it for August because of the title and because August is Women in Translation month!

[Gala · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Esta novela de Romina Paula tiene un trabajo importante sobre la prosa. Creo que eso es a lo que básicamente apunta el libro. Hay un intento, casi siempre bien logrado, de llevar la oralidad a la escritura, lo más cercano posible. Por eso, es como si la novela fuera impulsiva, no da respiro, porque en realidad, más que llevar la oralidad a la escritura, lo que hace Romina Paula es llevar al texto los propios pensamientos de su protagonista. Por eso muchas veces encontramos un texto algo desorganizado, caótico, repetitivo, quizás inconexo. Al principio me costó entrar en la historia, pero más o menos al tercio ya se empieza a notar qué es lo que su autora quiere lograr con el trabajo sobre la prosa. Más allá de esto, creo que a nivel argumental le falta un poco. Me hubiera gustado que ahondara más en la relación entre la narradora y su amiga, que en definitiva es de lo que se trata Agosto.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that’s confused about what it wants to be – but that’s alright, I’ve read quite a few like that that have gone on and become favourites. It’s got contemporary written all over it, from the easy speaking style, “likes” spattered everywhere, to the sentences that reshape and rework themselves two or three times midway through. Multiple storylines are opened and maybe one gets what you would call an acceptable resolution. In the end, this isn’t so much Emilia coming to terms with the death of her friend Andrea, but rather Emilia returning to the town in which she used to live. Sure, she is there to spread the ashes of Andrea. But really, she is stepping into a curiosity of an emotional blob, which includes the family of the deceased, her own family, and her ex. The emotional spikes are well written, but there is a lot that could be cut from this story. In the end, a tiny tinge of woe remains.

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué maravilla es Romina Paula. Me encanta cómo va ligando distintos temas, la muerte, la amistad, sexo, parejas, recuerdos, familia, amor. Es de mis autoras argentinas favoritas, sin duda.

[Jim Elkins]

Why it is Important That Novels Can Fail in Many Ways


This essay began as a review of Romina Paula's novel August, but in the end what I wanted to say was very simple. The book's themes are potentially complex (it's about suicide, abandonment, love, fidelity, and memory) and it struck me as odd that a complicated structure, like a novel, can seem to become a matter of simple problems. This essay is more about that problem than about Paula's novel. First I'll rehearse my difficulties with the novel, then I'll explain why it seems to be significant that novels often fail in many ways, even though reviews tend to focus just one or two themes.

A word about the word "failure." I am not talking, in this essay, about the author's intentions or reader's expectations. Many novels, hopefully most, succeed for their authors and readers. "Failure" is the ordinary condition of average art in any medium: it denotes the fact that the majority of novels aren't remembered for long, and don't participate in the conversations about what might count as ambitious or challenging novels in the 21st century. There's more on "failure," "average" art, and other subjects in this essay on visual art: ow.ly/iVrh30bxbds. I am interested in what can be done with the novel when it's written, and read, in full awareness of precedents from modernism to the present. "Fail" could be put in scare quotes as a reminder that it doesn't mean a novel isn't rewarding, entrancing, or moving--and it certainly doesn't mean a novel isn't successful--but rather that it does not respond to the last hundred years of novels, so it is not a part of the conversation about what novels can be.

I'd like to thank Andrei Molotiu, who read a first draft of this and pointed out that my lists of things that cause novels to "fail" sound prescriptive, as if I have a ready-made list of things novels should avoid. All I can say is this isn't a fixed list. It shifts and changes with each book.

Each novel proposes implicit norms, practices, and theories of form and content as it goes along, and a reader will notice when it diverges from those parameters. For example, a novel might depict a character as amnesiac, and then recount an episode in which she remembers things perfectly; that kind of diversion requires an acknowledgment: the narrator needs to explain it, or the novel needs to provide a logic that makes sense of it. Otherwise readers will doubt first the character, then the narrator, and then the implied author. Most novels don't have that sort of obvious continuity problem, but all novels have unevennesses and inconsistencies. They are what I am responding to in Paula's novel: she proposes the novel is about suicide, but pays unaccountably uneven attention to that theme. In the second part of this essay, "failures" are meant in the same way: they are things novelists establish and then lose track of, or lose control over. None of the items in my lists in the second part of this essay are necessarily problems: they become so when they are not acknowledged in the structure of the novels that create them. This means even a deeply inconsistent novel, one that has most of the "failures" I list, can be successful: "Naked Lunch" is an example, because lack of consistency is built into its structure. Conversely, very careful and consistent novels can be failures: Agatha Christie is a good example for me, because her books are perfectly uniformly logically constructed, with none of the "failures" I list here, and for me that is a large part of the reason that her books are not interesting as novels.

One last thing: the translation of "August" is exceptional, nearly flawless. Here is just one example from hundreds. "So I ask him, then, if he gets away a lot like this; do you get away a lot like this?" That semicolon is a wonderful solution to a difficult problem of voicing.

1. Criticism of "August"
The novel suffers most from an inability to imagine things other than the main story, which concerns a woman who struggles to decide how she feels about an ex-boyfriend she's encountered on a trip out of town. That narrative is well written, and wouldn't have raised any issues for me, if it weren't for the fact that she encounters her ex-boyfriend on a visit to Esquel (a town in the southwest of Argentina) where she had gone to stay with the parents of a friend of hers who had died by suicide. The parents exhume their daughter's body, have it cremated, and scatter the ashes, and she stays in her dead friend's room. The friend who has died is addressed throughout in the second person, which is an effective strategy at least in the English translation. This has potential, but five major subjects are missing:

(a) We don't get a sense that the narrator understands how the parents feel, and therefore
(b) We don't believe the author has had any close experience of parents who have lost a child.
(c) We are barely told anything about the dead person's sister, who also visits.
(d) Until late in the book, we know almost nothing about the narrator's own mother, who abandoned her as a child, and who she thought was dead. (Even after we're told, we still don't see any reflection of the mother's actions on her daughter—the book's narrator—which is bizarre given that the entire book is about commitment.)
(e) We are never told how to imagine the narrator's relationship with the woman who died. It's as if the person who died was just an idea, not a person the narrator actually knew.

These are the principal gaps in the narrator's imagination when it comes to the theme of suicide. The implied author appears as a person who has known people who have died by suicide, but she does not seem to have experienced other people's reactions to suicide, and she does not seem to have thought much about what parents feel. She comes across as young, perhaps a teenager: the scenes of attraction, doubt, drinking, and travel are the most persuasive.

Given that the novel is about suicide, the narrator's lack of engagement with survivors (and herself, because she thought her mother had died by suicide), and the implied author's apparent obliviousness to her own lack of imagination about those characters, leaves gaps in the narrative. The logic of the novel calls for more meditations on suicide, done in different ways.

I can imagine a new chapter for each of the friend's parents, whose grief is nearly invisible in the book; more material on the narrator's own mother, who abandoned her; a meditation on the narrator's awareness of her similarity to her mother, which isn't developed and almost seems not to have been noticed by the narrator or the author; a chapter on the narrator's father, who comes across as absurdly affable and forgiving given that his wife left him and their children; and above all, more material on the friend who died: not in order to solve her absence, but to let us know the narrator has spent time thinking about it. All we hear about that is that she likes one of her former friend's CD's, her cat, and her leather jacket.

These criticisms are matters of gaps in the narrator's and the implied author's imaginations. August "fails" in this sense: it proposes subjects and ways of thinking about them, and then it diverges from those ways, without accounting for its reasons. The book is mainly a love story, with several serious narratives of suicide and abandonment standing in the wings.

2. Why it is important that novels "fail" in many ways

I think a reasonable starting point in considering the criticism of modern and contemporary novels is that a typical novel fails. Revies typically mention one or two things that seem infelicitous or unconvincing, but as readers know, that doesn't tally with the experience of reading.

Novels ordinarily fail continuously and repeatedly, dozens or hundreds of times over the course of a reading, and the variety of the sources of failure testifies to the richness and complexity of the genre. If novels failed for just a couple of reasons—the way scientific theories can fail, for example, just by being falsified—they wouldn't be as challenging, and it wouldn't be as important to be as ambitious as possible both in reading and in writing them.

For example, it could be said that August doesn't cohere. The reason why lack of unity or coherence is a common verdict is not simply that unity is an elusive goal, but because there are so many sources of incoherence, so many ways that a novel can be at odds with itself, undermine itself—and some of those are expected in modern and postmodern fiction. A writer can abuse a trusting reader, disabuse a generous one, undermine their own logic of time and narrative, stray from depictions of character, lose inertia, or lose track of voice, tone, mood, affect, realism or naturalism, idiom, or style. It is the proliferation of pitfalls that makes novels so interesting, not the single fault (lack of coherence, in this example) that might emerge in a review. "Coherence" is, after all, is a kind of covering term: a simplification brought on by a reader's exhaustion and their attempt to keep the whole in mind. (A good theorist of this problem is William Empson.)

This may sound abstract, but it is only a way of putting a common reader's experience: when you begin a novel, after the initial pages (during which it's normal to suspend judgment, and try to attend to the form of the text or the author's intentions), it is common to encounter different kinds of infelicities one after another: obtrusive digressions or ellipses, surprising and apparently uncontrolled lacunae, shifts in tense, solecisms, inappropriate asides, unwarranted assumptions about the reader's interests or knowledge, unnoticed borrowings, clichés, uncontrolled shifts from tragedy to satire or comedy, a million sorts of awkwardnesses, a tone that lapses, unintentional narrative discontinuities, failures of depiction, lags and douleurs, unconvincing details. Unless you note these one after another, producing a kind of endless and unreadable microcriticism, they will begin to coalesce in your mind, and form into groups.

As you move on toward the end of the book, even simplified lists of reservations may become too long to remember. At the same time, if the author is living and might read the review, it may seem unhelpful to articulate more than one or two principal problems with the book: novels are so deeply woven into their authors' ways of thinking that it seldom helps to review issues one by one. (Teachers in MFA writing programs have to wrestle with that sort of problem: readers and reviewers usually don't.) Only the most patient and skillful reviewers, like Adam Mars-Jones, can conjure more than a few of a novel's distinct problems, and even then it takes many pages to do so. And after you've finished reading, all these unclassifiable and heterogeneous moments of failure might all coalesce into an impression of the novel's coherence or lack of it.

But just because reviews simplify and condense readers' reactions doesn't mean that those simplified judgments are adequate. What matters in novels is the number of ways they fail, the bewildering and entangled and multidimensional ways that novels fail continuously, on every page. That matters because it is the clearest evidence that modern and contemporary novels can actually in some meaningful way contain thought.

[Emejota (Juli) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este es uno de esos libros que le hablan a una generación específica. Su protagonista, una treintañera de clase media (o quizá tenga cuarenta, por ahí), nos cuenta un momento de su vida. En realidad se lo cuenta a su amiga que falleció recientemente, tiene ese recurso que por momentos es simpático, le habla a ella. Justamente el punto inicial del libro es la vuelta de la protagonista a su ciudad natal para llevar las cenizas de su amiga. Pero es solo el inicio, la historia pasa por otro lado.

Digo que le habla a una generación porque las emociones de trasfondo son las de mucha gente de 30-40 años. La confusión que genera lo obsoleto del amor romántico, esa incomodidad con la vida, ese descontento e insatisfacción constante, ese no saber a dónde ir o qué hacer pero seguir igual.

Además de transmitir todo esto, Romina Paula hace un buen trabajo reproduciendo la oralidad aunque trastocándola. Le mete poesía, crea imágenes oscuras y bellas. No se queda solo en el monólogo interno, va un paso mas.

[Agustina de Diego · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es la primera vez que leo a Romina Paula y me encantó su voz narrativa, fresca, llevadera y a la vez profunda. Muy recomendable

[Ninozhka Wieder · Rating 5 out of 5]

me enamoré de la escritura de Romina Paula y alargué esta lectura lo más que pude. me dieron ganas de llorar junto a la protagonista cuando llora sola en la calle.

[Santiago González · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miss ladrillos

Estoy medio disperso para la lectura, mucho boludeo en redes sociales, otros intereses. Arranqué las vacaciones con esta novela que tenía pendiente desde hace unos cuantos años y a que miqueridaesposa le había gustado mucho.

Gran comienzo de año. Me costó entrar en clima, pero eso es una decisión de la autora que, lo mejor que hace en esta novela, es el modo en el que va sumando información ladrillo a ladrillo hasta construir una historia de aparente sencillez sobre los grandes temas de la humanidad: el paso del tiempo, la muerte, su ausencia, lo que no fue.

Obviamente se las recomiendo y también les recomiendo que dejen de pavear en las redes. como yo.

==

Si te gustan mis reseñas tal vez también te guste mi newsletter sobre libros que se llama "No se puede leer todo". Se pueden suscribir gratis, poniendo su mail en este link: eepurl.com/hbwz7v La encuentran en Twitter como @Nosepuedeleert1, en Instagram como @Nosepuedeleertodo y en Facebook. Mi twitter personal es @santizalez.

Gracias, te espero

Sant

[guao!a · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me encantó lo cercano que se sintió este libro y la manera en que esta narrado, por momentos lo sentía atolondrado, como pensamientos apilados uno arriba del otro, desordenado, de la misma forma que una escribiría en su propio diario.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agosto es una excelente novela. Ya lo dije y lo repito, Romina Paula sabe escribir. Maneja las palabras sin ademanes grandilocuentes, de manera sencilla pero contundente. La profundidad que logra en el relato de las situaciones (aún cuando casi no hay diálogo, esos diálogos brillantes a los que nos tiene acostumbrados dramatúrgicamente) pone más de una vez la piel de gallina. Nada pasa, todo pasa. El pensamiento interno, las dudas, las mezclas. Imperdible tránsito para quien quiera emprender el viaje. Ahora sí, una vez que se empieza, imposible parar.

[Cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Llevo tiempo leyendo libros que me llegan dentro o que simplemente me enganchan y me dejan una sensación bonita por dentro, y aun así Agosto es de lo mejor que me he leído en meses, quizá años. No es un libro subrayable si no quieres acabar con todas las páginas pintarrajeadas. Creo que lo que más me ha gustado es la concordancia entre el tono, el estilo, y lo que pasa, cómo transmite tanto a través de frases cotidianas, del lenguaje de la calle, de la confusión y la tensión de tener dentro un remolino de emociones y no saber cómo lidiar con ellas. Es preciosísimo, una joya.

[Daniela Francisca Meza Covarrubias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gustan leer de los duelos, me gustan porque los duelos no tienen un procedimiento estándar y se va viviendo de forma particular por cada persona e incluso una persona puede vivir los distintos duelos que se tiene de forma distinta.

En Agosto seguimos a Emilia que vuelve a la Patagonia, su ciudad de origen, desde Bs. Aries para acompañar a la familia de su amiga de toda la vida a esparcir sus cenizas luego de 5 años de su muerte, por lo cual vamos conociendo el duelo por la partida de su amiga; pero también todos los duelos asociados a la partida de su hogar desde la lejanía del tiempo y todo lo que le va pasando al volver y re encontrarse con personas y con el territorio que la vio crecer, vamos conociendo todos los duelos cotidianos a partir de la decisión de irse de su hogar y comenzar una nueva etapa de su vida.

Me gusto la forma en la que estaba escrita, en un monólogo impulsivo de Emilia de sus pensamientos, emociones, sentires y cuestionamientos tanto con ellas como con los demás, todo lo que le va pasando al re encontrarse con las personas de su pasado cercano desde la visión de esta Emilia que ha recorrido otras experiencias; lo que en oportunidades hace sentir el relato desorganizado y en caos ... pero en que en definitiva es como se siente la protagonista y te pone a reflexionar en todos esos momentos en que una misma se ha sentido así, pq la vida no siempre es estructurada y uno sabe lo quiere y cómo esta, hay veces que la vida se vuelve pesada y una misma tiene esas cavilaciones e inseguridades.

Si bien puse que lo sentía como un monólogo impulsivo, en realidad lo que más me gusto de como esta escrito, es que estos pensamientos de Emilia van dirigidos y contados a su amiga que no tiene voz ni respuesta, y que hace que uno como lectora se posicione como receptora de todo lo que pasa por la mente de Emilia, receptora de sus inquietudes, miedos, sensaciones y todo lo que se va removiendo en este viaje. Todo esto me recuerda a cuando una misa se va cuestionando e imaginando lo que nos dirían ante nuestras dudas e interrogantes un otro ausente o que no esta, y lo hace tan real y tan íntimo.

Por último lo que tb me gusto es la sensación que el libro no tiene un porqué en esta estructura en que esta escrito, sin este orden lógico y secuencial, esa sensación que no hay un principio ni un final definido, sino que todo lo que sucede va apareciendo de forma espontanea y no lineal; y la vida no es lineal y los sentimientos tampoco, y la forma en que esta construida el relato lo expresa en todas estas contradicciones tan reales

[Em Roggiero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me encanta cómo está escrito, se siente todo muy cercano y me parece espectacular cómo se traslada la oralidad a lo narrado. Es como estar hablando o leyendo a una amiga.

Me gusta el recurso de ir hacia el pasado para conocer un poco más la historia de los personajes y para construir mejor ese presente.

[Diego Navarrete · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profundo y real.

[Violely · Rating 4 out of 5]

En este libro no pasa nada pero pasa todo. Podríamos decir que es el recorte en un momento de la vida de una persona. El decirte a vos misma: voy a contar todo lo que pase en este viajecito, desde que surgió hasta mi regreso. Y…tarán!!, la magia sucede.

Y sí, esa es la historia. La protagonista emprende un viaje a su Patagonia natal, tiene un objetivo: esparcir unas cenizas, pero en el medio, y también antes y después, pasan otras muchas cosas. El libro es una larga charla con quien esas cenizas representan y fue parte de un momento trascendental en la vida de cualquier humano: la adolescencia. Hablamos de una segunda persona confesional, de un viaje y de cosas que pasan.

Es la historia de una treintañera que se armó un nuevo mundo en Buenos Aires y a la que ese regreso, aunque temporal, hace tambalear mucho de lo construido, repreguntarse, dudar, encontrarse con personas y lugares que fueron muy importantes. Me gustó este personaje con tantas dudas sobre su propia existencia, que muchas veces hace las cosas sin pensar y después trata de justificarse a sí misma, que es impulsiva, que mete la pata. Es muy autentica, tiene mucha profundidad. Disfrute mucho el recorrido.

[Candela Díaz Ciarlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sobre duelo, amor, amistad y confusiones varias. Absolutamente hermoso.

[Lorena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leí este libro con la emoción que leía novelas de adolescentes. Me agrada que sea una novela que habla de amor, pero que no lo haga de manera cursi ni chicle, que el amor de pareja no sea el punto central de la novela. Me sorprendió amablemente. Guarde algunas frases como "Lo mismo que me atrae es lo mismo que me deprime" "Siempre quise que estuviera bien, que por lo menos se acercarse a una cierta estabilidad emocional por lo menos. Pero ahora que infiero que la tiene, me da bronca, o dolor, no haber podido dársela yo, peor, que haya podido encontrarla en otra persona" "Los fines de semana me dan tirria, no me gustan, ese imperativo de pasarla bien, de hacer cosas, de hacer algo especial, el tiempo libre." También un capitulo que hablaba sobre poder leer mientras se hacían otras cosas, como caminar. Y justamente eso es lo que causa esta novela, no querer de parar de leer hasta el final.

[Emilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

HEAVY

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This read like an overwritten Tumblr post or Wattpad story lol. I really wanted to like it, but unfortunately I think a lot got lost in translation.

[Rocio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Promete más de lo que cumple. Olvidable.

[julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

ppf.... un relato sobre lutos (el d la muerte y el d las relaciones) que m podía haber destrozado por mil lados diferentes pero que me dejó tan fría como habitación con la ventana abierta con la calefaccion rota el 1 de enero en siberia. qué pena porq siempre digo q nadie me derrumba como un autora latinoamericana.....

[vero · Rating 3 out of 5]

llore en todos los capítulos de este libro, no se si fue un buen momento mental para leerlo
que importantes son las amigas, y como duele por siempre el no tenerlas

[Agnese · Rating 4 out of 5]

[…] the same thing happens every time I take a trip, that then I don’t want to return, that I always get entranced with some other life, that I fall in love with all those other women I am when I’m away, in other places, that what’s hard form me is commitment, that the alternative is easy, that starting from nothing is always easy […].

August by Romina Paula, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft, is a raw and poignant examination of grief, desire, and nostalgia.

The first person narrative, written in the form of a confession addressed to her deceased best friend Andrea, who committed suicide, gives us a glimpse into the conflicting thoughts of Emilia as she grieves the loss of her friend and also struggles to let go of her past.

Emilia lives in Buenos Aires and the return to her hometown in rural Patagonia to scatter the ashes of her friend evokes strong emotions in Emilia and forces her to confront the ghosts of her past that is very hard for her to do since she’s the type of person who typically chooses to deal with unpleasant situations by running away from them and maintaining past relationships in a permanent state of decay. She is discontent with her life but, at the same time, struggles to define what is it exactly that she wants, and because of that she, often unintentionally, manages to hurt the people in her life.

The book is very atmospheric and brilliantly portrays the raw, confusing, and conflicting emotions associated with trauma and the grieving process. While in Buenos Aires, the loss of her friend made Emilia feel that even the mundanities of life suddenly assumed a kind of dreamlike quality, but her trip to Patagonia, where everything reminds her of her friend and their shared experiences, has the effect of turning all these raw emotions up to 11.

I realize, I think I realize that I want to leave, but I also know I want to take you with me, and it’s impossible because you’re here, very here, I just now fully understood that. From there, from Buenos Aires, I can miss you very contemplatively, look at you, at us, as though through a glass in a shopwindow, our common/shared past, behind glass, get into a funk about it but at a safe remove, removed by that window pane. There, on the shelf, there’s a weak light that calms things down even further, and it gives it a halo of unreality, of something that happened far away and a long time ago, something one can step back from to observe, observe from afar, something one attends, as though it were something else, far away, removed from the body. But here it isn’t like that, I get here and you’re everywhere.

Another major theme of the book is desire. During her stay in Patagonia, Emilia tries to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, who has a family now but still harbours some feelings for her, and Emilia honestly admits that, given the opportunity, she would probably give in to the temptation. However, the book makes us question, whether these feelings are real or is it just another way how Emilia is attempting to escape her feelings of sadness and abandonment?

August is a very honest and deeply moving novel, beautifully translated into English by Jennifer Croft, that succeeds at articulating the confusing emotions associated with the grieving process which are often very difficult to put into words. It’s a book about trying to put yourself back together after a traumatic event.

I’ve always found August, particularly the end of August, to be one of the most melancholy times of the year since it marks the end of summer, and announces the arrival of Autumn and the dark, cold days that are yet to come, so, to me, this was the perfect book to end the month of August.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Briefly the book is about a woman returning to the small town she grew up in, and while staying in the room of her deceased best friend coming to terms with herself and her life. While this book straddles the line with one of my least favorite tenses (first person present) it is really one woman confessing to her dead friend all the ways life is messing her up, and ruminating on what to do about them.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Romina Paula is under 40. Everyone I know in our early to mid-30s either is or has recently struggled in some way with the various emotions and family landscapes that Paula explores in this work. I hope this book does well enough that some of her other works will be translated, I would love to see what one of her plays is like.


full review: www.faintingviolet.wordpress.com/2017...

[Chloé Caldwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

What pacing, what rhythm, what lyrical prose. It takes a skilled writer to find humor and levity in a narrative like this, as it's a novel written from the narrator's POV to her deceased best friend, just 21 years old. Romina's voice is reminiscent of three of my underrated fave authors: Thérèse Bohman, Victor Lodato, and Miriam Toewes. I'm only annoyed that this is Romina's first book to be translated into English. I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to read her others. This novel is an urgent reminder that narrative is how we make sense of obliteration. Feminist Press is killin' it lately.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy buen libro! Me gusto mucho esa prosa acompasada que dice, que dice sin parar, compulsivamente. Y la forma en que lo dice. Largos pensamientos que fluyen, que se preguntan, que se contestan, que intimidan, que se gozan. Hay capítulos que son gloriosos. Una escritora diferente, original, novedosa. Creo que al final, los últimos capítulos no estuvieron a la altura general del libro. Pero, de todas maneras, es muy recomendable.

[Virginia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gustó mucho como se construye el relato a partir de la segunda persona, de esa especie de diario que la protagonista le escribe a su amiga muerta. Es una linda novela con mucha nostalgia, melancolía, amor y amistad.

[Nina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Esperaba muchísimo más, siento que perdí tiempo leyéndolo. El relato va desbocado todo el libro y llega a un final bastante abrupto que te deja con gusto a nada.sólo lo terminé porque era cortito.

[Juan Quiroga · Rating 4 out of 5]

"¿En qué nos parecemos tú y yo a la nieve?"

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